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A common argument in trans discourse is "who are you to say someone isn't the gender he says he is? No one would know better than the person himself."
I've spent years operating on the opposite assumption about myself, that I'm a bad judge of myself. Furthermore, everyone has dissatisfaction with themselves and the world. Personally, I flip-flop, get dissatisfied about my life and direction, but most people tell me "that's life, get over it". But if I had a trans-like belief that "I know what I am, but the world won't let me be it," with tons of people telling me over and over that I'm right and there are evil people out to get me, I think I'd have latched onto it hard. Not because it's necessarily true, though. It converts vague restlessness into a clear enemy and a fixed identity, and that provides false stability and obsession for a feeling of listlessness.
So I don't buy that conviction is evidence of accuracy. If anything, the more invested I am in a belief about my identity, the less I honestly should trust it. I think it's at least possible that having an outside view is more accurate than one's own personal beliefs.
Is having skin in the game a reason to trust your self-read more, or less?
Let's talk about your penis. How do you feel about it on a scale from 1 to 10 where
1 is "An appendage I associate with great fun and joy especially when it's very hard and having an orgasm and ejaculating inside of a female"
and 10 is more like "A fleshy ugly cockroach-like thing sticking out of my body that I would cut off at the first opportunity if I could find and afford a doctor willing to do it"
Do you find yourself flip flopping much between those? Do you think you should trust your belief less if you are firmly at #1 rather than scoring your penis a more even and sober #5?
There are a lot of narcissistic tourists to trans stuff that cloudy the discourse considerably but there are honest to goodness people that are at #10 and have been for as long as they can remember.
We should aim to treat 10 with psychological interventions. I highly doubt we have exhausted the possibilities for treating the disorder. Have we tried psychedelics, like ecstasy and LSD, to nudge them toward loving themselves? As a last resort, maybe we allow them to neuter themselves, but there is as much relation between “sever junk” and “I’m a beautiful woman” as there is between “sever limb” and “I’m a butterfly”. There is no reason to think that 10 is closer to being a woman than 1. The most adamant transgenders are often the most masculinized behaviorally. In what sense does a 10 who is a video game speedrunner or a fan of Paradox games plausibly know what being a woman involves? It’s likely that they know less about the inner life of women than the average rugby player whose name is literally Chad.
Quite right, it's like those ftm people who film these tearful face-in-camera clips for tiktok about how they never realized men don't have these female-style social attachments and how it's so lonely being a man and how men need to act more like women in affirming eachother. Mindset, worldview and even diction remains female even with some wimpy beard and hairstyle changes on the outside.
There are indeed actual men who go on tiktok and behave like that, there are male feminist types... but it's a very unusual kind of man who does this and many of them might just be faking it for access to pussy.
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Let alone the upside of having a penis. I was a speedrunner once. And while I certainly had no desire to be castrated, that sick voice in my head has certainly wondered, at times, whether it would have made me better off.
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That is arguably a good first line approach.
But what if you're the person suffering from this kind of body dysphoria and you've tried a number of psychological interventions, nothing works, and you also have bouts of self harm because of how upsetting it is and you're pretty damn sure if you could just have it removed you'd feel a lot better about yourself and there's countless reports on Internet forums from people like you who went through the same thing and life got way better for them?
You know there's a risk it might not help but you're willing to try because you just find yourself wishing you could die with increasing frequency?
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There are also people who want to have healthy limbs amputated and feel the same way about their leg or arm as the 10 feels about their penis. Should we accommodate them? Some surgeons would say "yes". Even though for some of them, being a wheelchair user is also bound up with some kind of fetish? Again, some would say "yes".
But if we consider it a sign of mental unwellness to think your left arm is an alien appendage and you want it cut off, then the same applies to the penis. That's where we're coming from: a 10 person can be completely sincere in their feelings but also mentally unwell.
Only if we could replace them with cool action hero augmentations!
I get what you're saying, but there are hormonal factors behind gender dysphoria in adults. I doubt there is an equivalent variable in wanting to saw off your limbs beyond a sick fetish. FWIW I'm happy to still classify gender dysphoria as a mental illness and homosexuality as disability-adjacent, even though I don't have any issue with either on moral grounds.
But it's a dysphoria! And if it's a dysphoria, then it must be accommodated, correct?
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I did in fact ask for this, as it were.
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To borrow some lefty terminology, a lot of people carry around a lot of emotional trauma. The idea that you should leverage that via threats of suicide to get other people to rearrange their lives around you or otherwise directly pay for cosmetic surgeries for you to get you over your trauma isn't the positive argument trans advocates think it is.
Following that is the simple fact that you don't need to exist as a sexual entity. Plenty of obese people turn asexual because they understand on some level that their obese body will never be what they want. Even if they lost weight, it would be a disaster of loose skin and morphed body parts requiring surgeries they can't afford. They don't want to have sex with their body anymore so they just don't. It's sad, it's traumatic, they still wake up and face the day.
The line between being a sad but relatable human being and being a narcissistic sociopath gets crossed by most trannies when they huddle together and start demanding privileges for their group and not others. They don't campaign on changing the classification of a lot of cosmetic surgeries from cosmetic to necessary. No, they just want those things for the trans. No consideration for anyone else but them.
On top of that, white men have held the high score on the suicide charts for a long time now. Did any tranny advocate ever allow that fact to sway them one way or another when it comes to the anti-white political projects they seemingly all participate in? No. Not once ever. So why should any white man be swayed by the argument when we change suicide victims? Trans people invoking suicides are not invoking an objective standard but their own ingroup preference for themselves.
Trans-advocacy exists as a group entity hostile to practically everything that allows trans people to exist in the first place. It's woven itself together with nigh every nihilistic anti-white political ideology that exists. If they had any semblance of kindness for the other they would not advertise their transness as anything other than a disease to be avoided. But as has been the case with the many chat groups that form around their identity, they are more interested in spreading their ailment than preventing it. Like a 'health at every size' advocate that presents obesity as healthy right up until the day they die from their obesity.
Maybe some people are obese because they genuinely have medical issues that cause them to gain an absurd amount of weight. And maybe some trans people are a #10. But the idea that this is what the trans identity advocates are representing, just like the idea that HAES is presenting healthy big boned folks, is an obvious falsehood.
I appreciate this argument but I would also like to push back a bit.
How do you feel about women whose breasts grow grotesquely huge after childbirth and they have breast reductions so they can regain range of motion and feel less bad about how they look? Most insurance actually covers this.
What about dudes who feel very scrawny and not manly enough who take steroids and hit the gym and get swole? Doctors will never prescribe steroids for this even out of pocket and even if the guy feels suicidal.
What if trans rights groups stopped at simply demanding the medical right to have access to hormones and trans surgeries but didn't demand health insurance or social medical plans cover it. Is that okay?
I am all in favor of QoL or beautifying surgeries for mothers relating to their pregnancy.
I think doctors should look at broadening the scope for administering steroids to men insofar as it can be of benefit to them. That being said I believe the amount of men that would benefit from using steroids is small. Most of them just need to exercise.
I don't understand the implication of a medical right in this context. For instance, you don't need a medical right to buy a plane ticket and pay out of pocket for whatever cosmetic surgery you want.
If you are digging at a point with these questions I've missed it and you must spell it out for me.
I mean doctors will give you the sex change hormones or surgeries you ask for if you pay them their fee.
Are you okay with laws banning these trans medical practices or are you okay with consenting adults doing these things?
In the context of a western society I don't think genital mutilation has any place. On top of that the proliferation of drugs and the effort from trans advocates to have minors take them makes me question the safety of allowing them easy access to them. But it goes further than that.
Trans advocacy is in a corner right now. They've tethered themselves to the idea that the best way for a trans person to escape their male body is to go on hormone treatment very young. It makes sense biologically from a 'looksmaxxing' perspective, to borrow a term, but this flies in the face of any civilized conception of children and their ability to make decisions for themselves. If they had been more responsible and sane then I'd feel differently about their easy access to hormones. But as things stand? On one side trans people are a coalition of consenting adults with agency who decided to direct energy towards legalizing permanent body modification regimen for children, on the other a medically destitute group of mentally suffering victims on the verge of suicide. In neither case do I feel comfortable giving them easy access to permanent body modification or drugs.
To complicate things further, a lot of trans people will never pass. Giving such people 'trans affirming care' is a waste of time and effort. I could only support hormone treatment for a specific subset of trans individuals who have a chance at passing. And even then I find the entire endeavor morally questionable considering the implications of what happens to a human body after the age of ~35.
In real terms, with the most charitable interpretation possible for the trans side where we are talking about sexually a-typical but otherwise rational and well adjusted people who are not binding themselves to any hostile political message and are just looking to aesthetically please themselves in a safe and controlled way, we are essentially talking about looksmaxxing a select few men into looking like young women so they can sell themselves on social media or engage in sex work for a decade or so before we meet a line of hard reality modern medicine has not yet figured out how to address. That doesn't seem like a worthwhile effort to me.
To contrast that with something that I would find worthwhile: Giving young men testosterone that would lead to them not be depressed and alone and instead push them towards being productive members of society that make families. What is the case that makes transing people worthwhile? Because I genuinely don't believe that the ratio of potentially passable non transed people who would otherwise commit suicide is in any relevant way aided by the procedures we have today if we look at things long term. Outside of a few social media stars and sex workers who can leverage their unique status to make enough money. Nor do I believe that transing unpassable people is going to alleviate their woes. Since they will have to face the day and go to work knowing full well that they look off.
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And two centuries ago, people saw half their children die. It was sad, it was traumatic, they still woke up and faced the day.
We have overcome many things that were seen by previous generations as unalterable realities of life, giving the common person in today's world at least some benefits that were out of reach in earlier ages even to the mightiest kings. This process must continue at an increasing rate.
I do not put triumph over sickness, infirmity and hunger in the same box as deciding that you don't need to consider fellow humans either.
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Well, I certainly don't think 1 is in absolute and completely direct conflict with 10. I do think penises are ugly and weird, and I envy the smooth sleek female form sometimes.
When I was going through puberty and slightly before, and a bit afterward too, I had beliefs and hatreds about my body and penis, that I know now to be completely untrue, that I thought would mean that I would never find anyone who could love me in my life. Things changed for me eventually, but there were times when my feelings in that regard were stably different from what they are now. I've been firmly wrong before, and so has everyone.
As for "as long as they can remember", I don't take that at face value either. I'd have said the same thing at the time about my own beliefs. What counts as "long enough" to trust it? At very minimum, I don't think a belief formed before adulthood is a reliable basis for a permanent decision, whatever the belief is.
Also, I don't think I ever said that I trust someone's beliefs about himself specifically if they are more in the middle of a spectrum. I simply don't trust anyone's beliefs about himself.
Some and some.
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But statistically, everyone has to deal with this. It's called "having excess adipose tissue". You feel your stomach bunch up around you when you're sitting down. It's not particularly comfortable. I'd slam a knife into it and remove the offending tissue myself if it wasn't going to kill me or leave an absurd scar.
Now yes, sensory considerations mean I'm reminded of this fact more than other people, and is probably why the autism-trans pipeline exists considering sensory body-can't-forget-itself issues and autism are comorbid. (Actually, I bet the same is true of eating disorders. If I felt that happen to my body, yes, I'd absolutely try to eat as little as possible and/or throw up.)
It's kind of like the "gayness is evil, but some are tempted more than others" question, complete with the modern response of "well, it's everyone else's problem if they don't like it, just do whatever you want all the time". You can't just decide to keep the productive parts for whatever reason.
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